Mario Llosa - The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

But now these streets that once housed only thugs and prostitutes are also marijuana and cocaine centers. The drug traffic is worse here than in La Victoria, Rímac, Porvenir, or the slums. At night, these leprous corners, these sordid tenements, these pathetic saloons all turn into drug drops where marijuana and cocaine are bought and sold. Every day, they find another crude laboratory that processes cocaine. When the party that changed Mayta’s life took place, none of these things existed. There were few people in Lima who knew how to smoke marijuana, and cocaine was something for bohemian types and high-class nightclubs, something only a few night people would use to get rid of their hangovers so they could go on partying. Cocaine was far from being the most prosperous business in the country, and it wasn’t spreading all over the city. But none of this drug business is visible now as I walk along Jirón Dante toward the intersection with Jirón González Prada, just as Mayta must have walked that night to get to his aunt-godmother’s house — that is, if he came by bus or streetcar. In 1958, the streetcars still rattled along where cars from Zanjón now whiz by.

He was tired, foggy, with a slight buzzing in his head and a tremendous desire to soak his feet. There was no better remedy for physical or mental fatigue: that fresh, liquid sensation on his soles, arches, and toes relieved fatigue, dejection, and bad moods, and raised his morale. He had been walking since dawn, trying to sell Workers Voice in the Plaza Unión to the workers who were getting off the buses and streetcars and going into the factories on Avenida Argentina. Later, he had made two trips from the room on Jirón Zepita to Plaza Buenos Aires, in Cocharcas, first carrying some stencils and later an article by Daniel Guérin, translated from a French magazine, about colonialism in Indochina.

He had been on his feet for hours in the tiny print shop in Cocharcas, which, despite everything, still went on publishing the paper (with a bogus masthead, and payment in advance). He helped the compositor set the type and he corrected the proofs. Later, taking only one bus instead of the two that were really needed, he went to Rímac, where, every Wednesday in a tiny room on Avenida Francisco Pizarro, he would lead a study group of students from the University of San Marcos and the Engineering School. Afterward, without taking a break, with his stomach growling because all day he’d eaten only a dish of rice and greens in the university restaurant on Jirón Moquegua (he got in with an ID card from God knows when, which he updated from time to time), he attended the meeting of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (Trotskyist), in the garage over on Jirón Zorritas, which lasted two long, smoky, polemical hours.

Who would have wanted to go to a party after a day like that? Plus, he always hated parties. His knees were shaking, and he felt as though he were walking on hot coals. But how could he not go? Except when he was away or in jail, he had never missed one of his aunt’s parties. And in the future, tired or not, with his feet a wreck or not, he would not miss one, even if it meant just dropping in for a minute, just long enough to tell his aunt he loved her. The house was filled with noise. The door opened straightaway: “Hello, godson.”

“Hello, godmother,” Mayta said. “Happy birthday.”

“Mrs. Josefa Arrisueño?”

“Yes. Come in, come in.”

She’s well preserved. She has to be over seventy, but she sure doesn’t show it: no wrinkles, and very little gray in her dark hair. She’s plump, but she has a nice figure. Wide hips. She’s wearing a lilac-colored dress with a red sash. The room is big, dark, with unmatched chairs, a big mirror, a sewing machine, a television set, a table, a Lord of Miracles, a San Martín de Porres, photos on the wall, and a vase filled with wax roses. Did the party where Mayta met Vallejos take place here?

“Right here.” Mrs. Arrisueño nods, looking around the room. She points to a rocker loaded with magazines. “I can just see them there, yakking away.”

There weren’t many people, but lots of smoke, the clinking of glasses, and the waltz “Idolo” at full blast. One couple was dancing and several were keeping time to the music, clapping hands or humming. Mayta, as always, felt out of place and sensed he might make a fool of himself at any moment. He would never be at ease in company. The table and chairs had been pushed into a corner so there would be space for dancing. Someone had a guitar under his arm. The people one might expect to see were there, and some others as well: her cousins, lovers, neighbors, relatives, and friends one would remember from other birthdays. But the skinny chatterbox — this was the first time he’d ever been seen there.

“He wasn’t a friend of the family’s,” says Mrs. Arrisueño, “but a lover or relative or something of a friend of Zoilita’s, my eldest daughter. She brought him, and no one knew anything about him.”

But they soon found out he was a nice guy, a good dancer, a good drinker, a smooth talker, and knew lots of jokes. Mayta said hello to his cousins, took a ham sandwich in one hand and a glass of beer in the other, and looked for a chair where he could collapse. The only free one was next to the skinny guy, who was standing there gesturing, holding forth to a chorus of three: the cousins Zoilita and Alicia and an old man in slippers. Trying to pass unnoticed, Mayta sat down next to them so he could let a respectable amount of time pass and then go home to sleep.

“He’d never stay long,” says Mrs. Arrisueño, rummaging through her pockets for a handkerchief. “He didn’t like parties. He wasn’t like other people. Never, not even when he was a kid. Always serious, always a little gentleman. His mother would say, ‘He was born old.’ She was my sister, see? Mayta’s birth was the tragedy of her life, because the moment she figured out she was pregnant, her boyfriend disappeared. Never saw him again. Do you think Mayta was that way because he had no father? He only came to my birthday parties to be polite. I brought him here when my sister died. He was the boy God never gave me. I only had girls. Zoilita and Alicia. They’re both in Venezuela, married, with children. Doing fine. I might have been able to remarry, but my daughters were so against it that I stayed a widow. A big mistake, let me tell you. Because now look at my life: I’m all alone, like a mushroom, a target for the thieves who’ll break in here any time now. My daughters send me a little something every month. If it weren’t for them, I’d be in a bad way, see?”

As she speaks, she looks me over, just barely dissimulating her curiosity. Her voice cracks once in a while, just like Mayta’s; her hands are big; and even though she smiles from time to time, her eyes are sad and watery. She complains about the rising cost of living, about the muggings—“There’s not a single woman in this neighborhood who hasn’t been attacked at least once”—about the robbery at the branch of the Banco de Crédito where so many poor people got shot, and about not being able to go to Venezuela too, where the streets are paved with gold.

“At the Salesian, we all thought Mayta would become a priest,” I say to her.

“That’s what my sister thought, too.” She nods, blowing her nose. “Me, too. He would make the sign of the cross whenever he passed a church; he went to Communion every Sunday. A little saint. Who’d ever have said it — I mean, that he would turn out to be a communist. In those days, it didn’t seem possible that a kid as religious as that would become a communist. But that’s all changed; now there are lots of communist priests, right? I can remember perfectly the day he walked through that door.”